Thursday Market Folly – You Need an AAPL a Day to Maintain Dow 22,000

After a quick rejection, the Dow is drifiting along under the 22,000 line and it LOOKS bullish but let’s remember that it took big moves by Caterpillar ($10), Goldman Sachs ($10), JP Morgan ($8), Boeing ($30) and Apple ($7) on earnings to give the Dow it’s last 500 points. That’s a tough act to follow for sure.

And it’s been a sort of a feedback loop because each earnings win pops the index, which raises all the Dow components and then the next one hits and reinforces the gains from the last win and then the index makes a new high and more money pours into the ETFs, etc. All very nice if you are bullish but the rally, on the whole, has come on fairly low volume and, now that earnings are over, we’ll have to wonder what catalysts is going to take us over 22,000 (our shorting target), let alone hold us up here.

Over in Europe, they have earnings too and the Europeans were not as impressed with earnings as the US investors were. In fact, Germany’s DAX is down 5% from their June highs along with the Euro Stoxx Index, which fell from 3,650 to 3,450 while the S&P added 50 points (2%).

Major Global Indexes don’t usually diverge from each other that much and the Nikkei has been trending down as well so someone is delusional and it’s probably the country that elected a reality show host to be their President – I’m just saying…

The Dow is up 600 points since it’s June high and that’s 2.8% but, more importantly, since the election, the Dow is up from 18,000 so 4,000 points is 22% and I have to ask you – has Trump made things 22% better in 9 months? And we’re not taking about a 22% rebound after a sell-off, the Dow had already gained 50% since 2012 (4 years) from 12,000 to 18,000 so this 22% is just a cherry on top of all that fudge and whipped cream that was already piled on the QE sundae that had already taken us from 6,000 to 12,000 in the 4 years before that.